Category: Landscape Activism: effect change at the root

What Can You Do About Deer Overpopulation?

Many of my clients in Oregon deal with deer overpopulation. This manifests in deer coming onto their property and eating their plants. When you invest in delicious food-producing plants, you want to eat them, not watch them be decimated by deer. I recently advised a client who reached out with questions about how to deal with a lot of deer in her neighborhood doing exactly this.

The problem of deer overpopulation is in truth an issue of wildlife mismanagement. Deer are a problem because their predators have been removed from the system. I highly recommend advocating for protections for natural predators such as cougars, bears, and wolves. These animals rarely attack humans and are vital to a healthy regional ecosystem.

Edible Landscaping Is Food Self-Reliance

With a sudden pandemic, supplies emptied from store shelves, and the stock market crashing to levels not seen since the eighties, you might be thinking like a prepper these days. The folks who’ve been stockpiling food, water, and ammunition could have been right to prepare. But what steps can you take to become more resilient to the ever-mutating coronavirus if you’re starting now? From an ecological perspective, edible landscaping is one of the smartest investments you can make.

It’s Spring, and despite the quarantine and isolation directive we’re all under, the birdsong stands in sharp contrast to the dire warnings of the media and government. Since we’ll all be spending more time alone, now is the right time to start or get back into gardening. Food self-reliance is a good feeling, and it could become an important way to keep your loved ones healthy during this international crisis.

Tree Removal Service for a 75 Year-Old Stunner

A former client of ours recently took advantage of our complimentary email Q&A following completion of her permaculture master plan. Her neighbors felt a little afraid that the tree might fall on them in high winds. The previous week had presented us all with several days and nights of windy weather, and one of the Pine’s limbs had broken in the storm. The tree removal service for trimming hadn’t shown up for the appointment she had made prior to contacting me. As with most things, the unintended pause allowed her intuition an opportunity to breathe. She was able to voice her suspicions that the missed appointment had happened for a reason, maybe that the tree should not be taken down.Read More

Did you know that wild creatures perform what are called ‘ecosystem services’ and that if you provide habitat for beneficial wildlife they can help you reduce your maintenance and utility costs while increasing your property value?

Take a look at this short video to learn more and get a FREE strategy specific to your property by signing up HERE.

It’s easy to lower your landscape maintenance bills by attracting beneficial wildlife. You can use permaculture to create a low-cost, food-producing oasis in your yard.

Before a Transition Pasadena steering meeting this past Fall, I came outside looking for one of my cats just in time to see him playing with something he seemed very interested in. Unfortunately, it was a hummingbird.

How to Keep What Rainfall Your Yard Gets

Rain. Some of us get more of it than others. In some cities it pours most of the year, while in others total annual rainfall is measured in a tuna can. You might not need to conserve as much water if you get a lot of rain. But even in high-precipitation areas of the country (and world), it’s more about infiltration than how much rain falls.

Infiltration is king when it comes to making the most use of rainfall. In areas where soil is exposed and compacted, water can’t make its way in. Instead, it sheets over the top of the soil. This means it ends up in the ill-conceived street drainage system. I say ill-conceived because the storm water engineering we’re all living with was designed to carry water away, not into, the landscape.

Factors of Climate Change We Can Use to Restore Balance

Some factors of climate change are malleable. Whether or not Earth Changes are natural or man-made, it is a fact that human beings can directly impact local temperature, moisture, soil health, wildlife habitat, and food availability. This article discusses Trump Forest, planted in 2017 in response to the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and our president’s executive order forcing the EPA to rewrite the Clean Power Plan to prioritize energy production. I’ll also discuss the success of the forest and make recommendations for other things we can all do to restore the functioning of the landscape as a climate-stabilizing powerhouse.

The goal of Trump Forest was to plant 10 million trees around the world. This would, according to researchers behind the project, offset a significant amount of carbon emitted by a step backward to industry-focused energy production. The actual number of trees planted ended up being 1,409,857, so the project was cut short. But that’s still a good number of trees. Now let’s take a look at replanting survival and how to keep new trees alive.